Posted
by
Zonk
on Friday February 03, 2006 @09:38PM
from the perspective dept.

suso writes "30 years ago today, Bill Gates wrote the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists about licensing of Altair BASIC to the Homebrew Computer Club. Looking back it's interesting to read this emotionally written document as it is probably Gate's first publicly written opinion about licensing software." From the letter: "The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft. What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at."

OK, I'm not implying that software piracy is a good thing. If it's not free, then you should pay for it, to show respect to the people who worked hard to produce the software.But also, Bill Gates was definitely much rougher in the letter than he needed to be to get his point across, which is why it is difficult to feel sympathetic to his cause. The perception of him as a "bully" is mostly because of the tone of the letter.

I remember the time when this letter was written and although I don't agree with his position, I think the tone of his letter was appropriate.

At the time nobody took seriously the idea that someone should be paid for software. We didn't pay for what was on the disk, we paid for the disk. Once we owned the disk, we felt anything on it was ours. The position of people like Bill Gates was very different, and he had to make a strong statement to get his point across.

The use of "piracy" in the context of copyright infringement is well established. In fact, this meaning has been around for about half the life of the word itself. The OED has dates to 1552 for pirate meaning the Blackbeard type and 1771 for copyright infringement. If you look at Pirate, the dates are 1387 and 1668 respectively -- there the latter definition has been around for almost 30 years MORE than the life of the word.Saying that "piracy" isn't an appropriate term is complete bull, to the point of bei

Interesting to see that Bill Gates hasn't changed much in 30 years! He still hates casual software piracy; the only difference is now he has much more influence...

Difference to whom?

Him? No, he believes in software ownership, and always has.

You? Probably yes, because pirating software nowadays can have more negative consequences than it use too... especially because software/technology producers have more influence today.

Personally, I find supporting open-source software much more rewarding than downloading a pirated copy of whatever. For starters, there's a lot of excellent OSS out there nowadays and participating in it, even if only as a user, helps it mature further. Plus, I believe that if someone wants you to pay for something they've created (or bought the rights too) then you must respect their wishes.

IMO, pirated software is for chumps. If you want a particular piece of retail software, then pay for it, otherwise grow some balls and support OSS... but please don't support pirating software and OSS too, it does neither camps of opinion any good.

I hope you realise that it shows that something is profoundly wrong with America. Since the capitalist system is supposed to be a meritocracy, whereby individual, haphazard transactions of consumers magically even out over time to reward contributors in direct proportion to their contributions (a.k.a. The Invisible Hand), this can only be construded as a total and complete failure of the capitalist system. Neither Bill Gates nor Paul Allen did ivented anything novel or unique, they merely happened to be, by happy circumstance at the right place and knew the right people. Add to it the supremely tenacious and boundless selfish greed of Gates and the rest is history. Unless of course you are going to suggest that a progression of work of others these two appropriated over time and an 8080 rendition of BASIC (a language neither of those two invented) was worth all those untold billions.

Shrewd? Bill was an efficient abuser of others and quick to exploit any disadvantages, like say, a conscience, they might have had for his profit. I guess you could call that "shrewd" although I have more choice words for it. Lucky? Certainly. But if luck is to be the cornerstone of the capitalist system then it is simply feudalism in a fancy dress. Risk? You gotta be kidding. We are talking about a spoiled, already rich brat whose entire early operation was underwritten (foolishly) by IBM.

The risk doesn't need to be financially based. He risked his growing reputation and he risked himself, in a sense, with many of the ballsy moves he pulled

I am afraid that "reputation" is no way a thing that you can risk in business, other in extreme cases of graft or failure so great that it becomes common knowledge of every layman. Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom is an example of that rare case. Bill Gates was never ever in a position to risk anything in that regard. Should his venture fail, he had a vast multitude of others opened to him, and I know it from personal experience that the business community's memory is shorter than that of a particularly forgetful goldfish. And when you add to this the fact that IBM (in an error that should never be forgoten) has essentially provided their then rather substantial resources in backing Microsoft's venture, and even managed to tie their own to his, leaving themselves no choice but to assist him. As far as Gates was concerned, there was no risk involved, ever. Then, once he had a fortune so substantial that a loong series of mistakes was not even able to make a dent in it, the rest of the "risk" argument is not only moot but rather comical.

I just hate when I hear fellow geeks blast him for being a shitty programmer. It took more than BASIC donkeys to make Microsoft what it is.

He actually is not that good. I had the opportunity to examine his early work in some detail and it was competent, to a degree, but nothing extraordinary for the time it was written. I know programmers who were far more talented and inspired at that time then Gates could ever dream of, doing similar things but whose far superior work is now not even a history footnote. Gate's only strengh was his unrelenting self-centered pursuit of money and power by legal manouvers (inspired by his father who was a high-powered lawyer), and on that front he was indeed rather effective.

Seems to me that someone is a bit jealous of Gates' success more than anything else... Probably still banging his head against the wall for not joining Microsoft when he had the chance...

Jealous is not the word. Try "dismayed at the great deficiencies of society" is more like it. My argument is not that either I or more likely one of those far more brilliant coders I spoke of should have replaced Gates. My point is that noone, ever should have been in Gate's today's position as competition should have established a vast network of suppliers cooperating within common standards based on the quality of their work. In such a scenario, each of these people would have his/her niche and the society would be better of for being far more egalitarian, just and ended up having much greater choice and strong scientific progress instead of what we have now. I am not sure if your realise this but Microsoft has set the computing industry back 50 years. Only now its products are beginning to feature ability to use terminals and begin to approach true mutitasking and multiuser functions. If you wait a few more years, we will have the 1960s OS virtualization coming back as a built-in feature. I don't know about you but I find the way things unfolded rather sad and tragic.

Microsoft produced a product that a whole bunch of people thought was worth spending money on instead of its competitors, and thus made its founders rich.

What competitors? I am not sure if you are familiar with the history of this but the "success" of Microsoft is a result of confluence of several factors: a) IBM's irrational decision to tie its fortunes to Microsoft's on an exclusive basis, b) general public's lack of understanding of principles of computing, leading it to treat everything and anything PC-related as a brand-new, never before heard of discovery, never you mind not realizing that Microsoft was doing them great disservice by reinventing 20 year-old principles, poorly and c) Bill's ability to create a vendor lock in, by unethical and morally repugnant manouvers both legal and technical. One leading to exclusions of all competitors by forming essentially a protection racket with major vendors and the other by creating great obstacles for users and developers should they consider a competing product. This is a text book example of failure of capitalism, the dangers of trusts and cartels and the limitations of the contribution-reward scheme when the consumers are deprived of sufficient information to make an informed purchase.

Sorry to say this, but the capitalist system abides to capital, not to merit. Blame it on the system.

While it is technically true, Adam Smith's argument was that the merit part is a side-effect of the mechanisms of the free marketplace and that is that side-effect which guides unwitting paticipants towards progress and improvement of their society (a guiding process he named "An Invisible Hand") which is the true function and the purpose of the system.

Odd how Bill Gates doesn't really like to tell the side of the
story where he stole PDP-10 time from a Seattle company (which
went out of business), one of the Universities in Seattle (which
kicked him and Paul Allen out when they found out about it), and
even Harvard University.

Yes, the PDP-10 time used to run 8080 simulators. Used to
write that initial Basic interpreter... stolen.

I think what he means is that you aren't deprived of the fruits of your labour, in this case, the blueprints (assuming they were copied and not stolen). The other guy takes them, but you still have them. So you aren't deprived of your work.

What you are deprived of is a monopoly on the right to benefit from the fruits of your labour. Without taking either side of the debate on this, it is important to recognize that there is nothing that naturally guarantees you this monopoly. If you amass knowledge (a feat that definitely can and often is prohibitively expensive) with an intent to capitalize on it, and someone copies that knowledge in its digital or written form with an intent to capitalize on it in the same way that you intended to (but without investing the time and money required to do the research), then you could definitely say that the person doing the copying has done something immoral -- but he has not actually deprived you of the fruits of your labour.

He has, most likely, decreased the amount of money you'll be able to make. This I think is what the RIAA and its ilk mean when they say that you are stealing -- not the music, per se, but the profits that they would have had had you been forced to buy instead of just copy.

Unfortunately, this argument is relatively hard to make conclusively, because you're arguing about something that hasn't happened yet and is not at all guaranteed to happen. It's like Minority Report -- is it moral to incarcerate criminals who have not yet commited a crime but that you believe are certain to?

I think from a philosophical perspective, all of this is very interesting, and is in fact far more complex than both sides want to admit.

Fortunately, we decided early on that copyright infringement is a crime, so there's not much guess work involved here: copying something that you did not create without a license allowing you to do so is illegal. It's not stealing, because theft deprives the owner of property, but it is still illegal.

Fortunately, we decided early on that copyright infringement is a crime, so there's not much guess work involved here: copying something that you did not create without a license allowing you to do so is illegal. It's not stealing, because theft deprives the owner of property, but it is still illegal.

That is true today, but it is perfectly proper to deliberate changing those laws. To argue that the laws as they stand are unjust or that different laws would be better is not mincing words. For better or w

That would be a nice form post (especially on slashdot), except in this case Bill Gates' argument is intimately tied to him. He argues about how his company has made an investment and deserves renumeration. When $40,000 of that investment is in fact stolen from someone else, why does he deserve to be paid ?

This is starting to get bland and pedantic, but there is a distinction to be made. In Gates' letter he makes two arguments. One is the general argument that developers deserve to get paid ("What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"), and the other is that he specifically deserves to be paid ("The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000."). Maybe we are talking about two different things ? I think the fact that he stole that $40,000 of computer time invalidates the latter. His general argument still stands. I even supported it in a another post.

Sigh. I'm trying to point out that a premise Gates used ($40,000 of invested computer time) does not apply (since he stole it and thus did not "invest" it). Gates' own argument refers to himself, so I don't see how people are claiming "it doesn't matter who makes the argument". If an innocent person makes the argument "I am innocent because of these facts" and a guilty person says the same thing, are you going to say the argument is true in the second case as well ? The facts do not apply to the second person, so his argument his non-sequitur.

He argues about how his company has made an investment and deserves renumeration.

All right, leaving ad hominem attacks aside for the benefit of those who commented about that previously, let's point out the fallacy in the argument, independent of Gates' character:

Just because you make an investment does not mean that you "deserve" remuneration, at least not in any meaningful sense that creates an obligation in anyone else. My dad, for example, invested in several stocks of companies that went belly up. While we can argue that he "deserved" remuneration because of his investment (after all, think of the children! which at the time would have been me and my brother), the fact is that his stocks turned into toilet paper, and his investment didn't somehow create a magic obligation on the part of the public to see to it that he got his "remuneration" regardless of whether or not there were an actual market for what the company did.

So, if nobody wants what you're selling, you may "deserve" to recoup your investment, but nobody is obligated to give it to you. I further contend that in that case it's not right to try to manipulate the market through coercive laws in order to _make_ a market that gives you your "deserved" "remuneration."

This is ridiculous. How can you compare data duplication to theft? It may make the original copy less valuable, but so does opening a new shoestore next to a shoestore you run. Devaluation is not theft, nor is duplication.

If the OP were arguing that the hobbyists were not stealing, yes, that would be an ad hominem argument. His point, however, is that Bill Gates is a hypocrite. The fact that he himself stole, to develop the very product he was pointing out others should not steal, makes him one.

Would you like to reply to his actual argument instead of just attacking the man?

His actual argument, like all those wishing to own and trade "intellectual property" disintegrates upon the examination of what it is that they wish to trade and then accuse others of stealing. Information is not, under any possible definition that can withstand even a most cursory test of logic, an object which can be traded. All principles of mercantile trade and also that of capitalism which is built on that trade are constructed upon the premise that the only things valid for trade are either physical (private property) or labour. An attemt to use law to redefine esoterical thought representations and large numbers into physical objects are not only morally repugnant but also a dire warning, a clear demonstration that the legal system is dangerously out of control and no longer subject to rules of decency and logic.

That is also a wholly independent and separate issue of that of how to reward artists and inventors for their creative works. To which a question many answers exist which do not require a totalitarian regime and a wholesale crippling of our freedoms to accomplish. However those who are enemies of those freedoms as they see them in the way of their boundless greed and therefore those who our mortal enemies, enemies of the human kind, enemies like Bill Gates or the so-called "music industry", would stop at nothing in order to use perversions of law to reap "rewards" so out of proportion with their contributions that soon their fortunes exceed that of 99% of their fellow citizens individually and probably good 30% of global population combined. There is no possible justification for that state of affairs, other then out-of control rule of greed and wholesale subjegations of law and the society to it.

Sorry, that is plainly incorrect. People pay for books. People pay for newspapers and weather reports. People pay for employees who have knowledge. Information is an extremely valuable asset.

Then lets examine each of these closer. What do you pay for in a book? The paper? The printing process or the ink? You perheaps imagine yourself paying for the information, but if it were so, you would be entitled to move it out of the book to any other medium of your choice, in perpetuity. Is it so? As a matter of fa

Then lets examine each of these closer. What do you pay for in a book? The paper? The printing process or the ink?

I don't know about you, but I pay for the intellectual or creative content. The paper and ink is worthless to me. When I buy eBooks, I don't pay for the DRM, or the bytes. I pay for the content. I buy books, electronic or paper, based on whether they can inform me, emotionally or factually.

but if it were so, you would be entitled to move it out of the book to any other medium of your choice,

I don't know about you, but I pay for the intellectual or creative content. The paper and ink is worthless to me. When I buy eBooks, I don't pay for the DRM, or the bytes. I pay for the content. I buy books, electronic or paper, based on whether they can inform me, emotionally or factually.

That is merely your preception or perhaps your intent. In fact you do pay only for the media and the processing of it. Information simply has no attributes which would make a transaction of its sale possible.

Yes, once the copyright expires. I buy lots of Shakespeare plays - but I can reproduce Shakespeare's insight as much as I please. Even under copyright, I can tranfer what I learned from the books to others, as long as I don't copy the text outright.

Then what is the difference between the information before the expiration of the copyright and after? Does it change qualities? Does it become a different thing? Or is it perhaps that some misguided people thought that by dictating conditions of what you can do with the thing you supposedly purchased after its sale (thus violating another of basic tenets of mercantile society) is a good way to encourage artists to produce more? And that this scheme, in addition to rewarding distributors and marketers of plastic disks far more then the artists, produces wee little side effect: that any logically consistent attempt to enforce this must result in one form of totalitarian repression or another? "copying the text outright"? Didn't you do so by reading it? Did not the CD player copy the data and then the amplifier, the speakers, the air particles and finaly your ears do so? Where is a differnce between "copying outright" and "orally transmitting it"? By hand signals? Etc and so on. And then of course onto more advanced questions like "what exactly is the information itself which is so protected?" A series of ink blots on paper? Electrons in neural pathways? Dimples in plastic? What exactly?

No. I pay for the creation of the work.

No you don't. Vast majority of the money goes to mass marketers, distributors, manipulators and gate keepers of the information. The artist receives a mere fraction of that money, and ironically, is rarely the "owner" of his own work. You are simply falling a victim to another aspect of this odious scam, that is the purposeful conflation of the attempts of turning information into private property and that of providing means of rewarding artists or scientists for their labour. In fact these two are separate and wholly independent issues. What the book and CD-sales model is attempting to do is to treat the process as if all creative activities were one and the same with assembly line production of mass market goods. It is the "idea as a plastic widget" model. The resulting effect is that of the artists receiving less in compensation for their effort then that under various patronage and pay for performance schemes of the past while some forms of "art" (read: kitsch) are manipulated and abused to create "products" by means of shameless marketing.

would rather not pay for the compilation - but even if that were free, I would voluntarily pay people who provide me with unique or interesting information.

That system is called patronage and is indeed a sane aproach. But you would be paying for the labour of producing the information, not the information itself as it has no possible way of being traded. It is simply so due to its fundamental nature.

I am in favor of all methods of unlinking these, so I can give more money to people who create intellectual value, rather than those who merely package it.

The problem is not unlinking the two, which happens regardless of the wishes of the stakeholders, and is merely a result of the nature of information. The problems is that an attempt to enforce a "mass market widget" model of renumeration to artists leads inevietably, logically and unavoidably to totalitarian measures. There is simply no other way to defeat the fu

The content is unsalealbe and unbuyable. The content is ideas in somebody else's head. Try to claim any ownership of the content after buying a copy of it and see how you are laughed all the way to you jail cell.

What you are buying is the service that facilitates your access to those ideas.

The device of copyright (right to copy, get it? Not right to buy) was devised precisely because ideas are completely different to physical objects.

Ideas / Information could be argued to be thoughts, that is "mental" labour, so what is the basic difference between selling the physical labour of chopping wood for an hour and instructing somebody howto better insulate their hose?

The difference is the end result. While chopping wood results in a unique set of physical objects, smaller chunks of wood where before there was a large one, the result of "mental labour" is an abstract concept, which by its very nature, exists by duplication (from mind to mind)

The person making the argument is a completely irrelevant aspect of the argument itself.

That's true only in a very limited sense. Logicians love to quote clear examples of logical and then claim that their examples apply to real arguments (ironically, this is itself an example of fallacious argumentation -- it's a straw man.) In the real world, the relationship between the argument and the person making the argument is a lot more complex. If the person making the argument has a known bias or pattern of behavior which may be affected by the outcome of the debate, it is entirely logical, and not at all fallacious, to take this into account when interpreting his words.

Ad hominem has no place in debating a point of logic (an argument is true or false no matter who says it), but it does have a place when dealing with human testimony.

Take two of your examples.

"You claim that this man is innocent, but you cannot be trusted since you are a criminal as well."

If the criminal's claim is a testimony of another man's confession in prison for example, and the criminal is a criminal because he committed fraud and perjury... His character very much becomes part of the debate, as he may be lying again, which makes his testimony unreliable.

"Tobacco company representatives are wrong when they say smoking doesn't seriously affect your health, because they're just defending their own multi-million-dollar financial interests."

If the tobacco rep says that smoking doesn't harm people's health, the fact that his role is specifically to defend the tobacco business makes his position questionable, his likelyhood of lying is greater, and his evidence should go through extra scrutiny to see if it is reliable. If he has no independant evidence at all, then his position becomes even more tenuous.

In a more abstract example, man A says argument T is the truth, based solely on his testimony. man B says A is lying because of his vested interest. According to you, that's an ad-hominem. T may or may not be true, but it's only true if A is not lying, so B has a valid reason to attack A's history of lying.

Ad-hominem is best called out when an attack is made on someone's character that bears no relation to the argument they're making - your 2nd example is much better.

In relation to TFA, Bill Gates is arguing that copying software is morally wrong, but he's doing it from a position in which he committed a similar moral wrong to write the software in the first place; i.e. the 'theft' of time from another. It's a case of "do what I say, not do what I do".

He bases his case for renumeration on "The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000."

Man A is claiming he deserves remuneration because of costs C, and that without payment P, he cannot afford to make software (argument T). Man B claims that man A didn't spend anywhere near costs C, because he used the expensive computer time without paying for it, so P is not actually paying for C, but is pure profit for A. P is not needed to cover C, so without sufficient P there's no reason to assume that A will stop making software. Ergo, argument T is false, and Bill Gates needs to find another reason why we should buy his software.

So it comes down to who you believe, A (Bill Gates) or B (Big Jojo), without other evidence. Man B's claim of theft of computer time directly affects man A's argument for remuneration, and is not an ad hominem.

Your argument is based on a logical fallacy known as ad hominem. Some examples of other such arguments (from Wikipedia that I linked):

* "You claim that this man is innocent, but you cannot be trusted since you are a criminal as well."
* "You feel that abortion should be legal, but I disagree because you are uneducated and poor."
* "He's physically addicted to nicotine. Of course he defends smoking!"

[...]where he stole PDP-10 time from a Seattle company (which went out of business), one of the Universities in Seattle (which kicked him and Paul Allen out when they found out about it), and even Harvard University.

I'm not questioning the validity of this statement in this post, but it would be great if someone would post some links to evidence supporting this allegation.

You'll not find any truthful supporting links as it's poorly crafted fiction. I attended Lakeside when both Bill Gates and Paul Allen were there. I was a couple of years behind Bill. Lakeside had a timeshare connection to a remote PDP machine for which the school purchased blocks of computing time in advance. Although it was not ever fully discussed, rumor at the time was that Paul and Bill inadvertently used an entire (expected) school year's worth of time in a single weekend. The amount of time was worth about $5,000 and although it caused a bit of a ruckus it was also admired by most of the students and much of the faculty (my mother was a faculty member at the time). The Allen and Gates families repaid the school and not much was thought of the affair.

No one was kicked out. No theft was ever claimed and the time was used in an academic manner--experimentation--rather than for any commercial purpose.

This was a couple years before the Altair Basic was written in hotel rooms near the Harvard campus.

How come your comments don't jive with the Register [theregister.co.uk], an article in the Statesman called "The Making Of The Empire" that was published in
26 February 2001, and other sources that basically say they changed log files monitoring time on the system, were caught and that they were banned from the system? Then, weeks later, a deal was struck where they could get time in exchange for documenting bugs?

How come your comments don't jive with the Register, an article in the Statesman called "The Making Of The Empire" that was published in 26 February 2001, and other sources that basically say they changed log files monitoring time on the system, were caught and that they were banned from the system? Then, weeks later, a deal was struck where they could get time in exchange for documenting bugs?

I cannot personally vouch for the veracity of Gates' early history provided at this site [vt.edu] but it seems to show that the events El Reg mentions happenned but that the time between them was several years. Basically they got in trouble in prep school in 1968 and then did the digging through code around that time as well. They wrote Altair Basic in 1974, 6 years later. So while they might have kept the code and copied it, it's also possible they didn't. I have no idea which is true, but it sounds like The Register decided to sensationalize their version a bit.

Personally I can't stand Gates', but I try to be fair. Both seem to indicate that they used PDP-10 time at Harvard to simulate the Altair 8080 in order to make their Altair Basic but nothing says Harvard was upset about it. It probably wasn't terribly kosher to do so but they got away with it.

My thoughts exactly. From the parent post(s);"It probably wasn't terribly kosher to do so but they got away with it."

and

"they changed log files monitoring time on the system, were caught and that they were banned from the system? Then, weeks later, a deal was struck where they could get time in exchange for documenting bugs."

Really, this shows their immoral business acumen at work, and shows that it has been repeated ad nauseam right from the start and continues to this day;

I dislike Microsoft and the things they (and Bill Gates) do as much as anyone but I have to be fair. The very next paragraph after what you quoted says this:

Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's bu

He makes a good point. Intellectual property is something that should be defended in order to preserve good order and for the sake of those who do the work. If there is no incentive to make money in a certain field, progress will suffer in a society such as a capitalist one.

I don't understand exactly what the point of this is on Slashdot. It's clear that Bill and pals wrote software and expected people to buy it. It's clear that many people pirated that software. It's clear that this made Bill unhappy.Bill didn't and doesn't want to give his software away. He's well within both his ethical and legal rights to charge for his software. Those who copy and sell his software without his permission are breaking the law and Bill is pointing that out.

Intellectual property has been defended all down the line... it's in the goddamn Constitution, for chrissakes (admittedly, Thomas Jefferson had doubts about the whole thing.) The problem is that the defense, in recent decades, has become far too vigorous and needs to be put back where it belongs. This idea that we need the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and all the other myriad bits of legal bullshit that have come down the line in order to eliminate the public d

If you want people to create stuff for you to use, you usually have to pay them. You can say that it should be otherwise, but the fact is, most people don't do stuff for free. They just don't. You either pay them, or it doesn't get done.

Fortunately, the GPL has given us a better way to pay people for the work of creating good software: They get paid with everybody else's work.

Fortunately, the GPL has given us a better way to pay people for the work of creating good software: They get paid with everybody else's work.

Really? Tell that to the janitor at Red Hat or the CEO or the sales reps. They seem to want to get paid in cash. And they've actually managed to convince you that somehow you don't deserve any of their money despite you doing the actual creative work. Yeah. Great idea.

Funny thing is, the whole "GPL" thing was originally a way for CASH-RICH geeks to pay something back

If there is no incentive to make money in a certain field, progress will suffer in a society such as a capitalist one.

Absolutely, but there shouldn't be blanket permission to prevent societies evolution to your gain. This was the original idea of copyright - the holder could make money out of their invention/creation for a "reasonable" period of time, then the content fell back into the public domain.

Also, once something is in the public domain, it should be there for all. Disney has made a fortune by taking out-of-copyright material (Cinderella, Pooh, Snow White), reworking it, then throwing lawyers at everybody who attempts to use the original material.

Finally, people who want to put their creations "conditionally" into the public domain (eg - GPL) should be protected. Although they aren't motivated by money, to see somebody else get rich by using your work (outside the rules) is a different kettle of fish.

...where you would "activate" your software license by locally printing out a punch tape which you mail to him and receive a response punch tape with your BASIC interpreter key. It didn't go over because toggling some front panel switches caused you to have to reactivate and mail a new punch tape to Gates.

If somebody is selling software, taking a copy of it and using it without paying for it is not cool. Taking a copy and selling copies of the copies is even less cool.

I mean, look, we get on people for GPL violations if they use GPL code in something and won't let people have the source code. Why is that bad? Because they are using somebody else's stuff without permission. The author has made it available under some terms, and other people want to make money off of it without following the terms. That is rude; it is unethical; and it is illegal.

Now, given all the stuff that Microsoft has done over the years, i don't think Bill Gates has a lot of room for the moral outrage. And the world might have been a better place had he shared the spirit of the hobbyists - the idea of freely sharing. But he still has a point.

Yes, but Microsoft has since learnt how to use casual piracy as a marketing tool. Letting people copy their software is an investment in the future for them.

Not really, that's more of an operating system tactic, Bill was selling BASIC at the time. The lesson Bill learned was to charge per CPU shipped, first by getting into Apple and Commodore ROMs, and eventually leading to the infamous "Microsoft tax" on PCs that leave the factory. Thank the casual pirates for that.

If somebody is selling software, taking a copy of it and using it without paying for it is not cool. Taking a copy and selling copies of the copies is even less cool.

Bill Gates would agree with you, but you might want to do as he does rather than as he says. Here's some nice reading material for you [kmfms.com]. It does not even mention the big greedy grab of macsyma, nastran and other software developed at public cost. Stealing software, on way or another, is something Bill is good at. It's a shame you should ta

They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.

People would show up at club meetings and sell pirated copies of commercial software? And people didn't see anything wrong with this?

Frankly, every time I read this letter, I'm very damned impressed with Bill Gates. He's worked very had to create an environment where commercial software can exist, and I'm very damned grateful to him for it.

People would show up at club meetings and sell pirated copies of commercial software? And people didn't see anything wrong with this?

Yes. It wasn't a criminal offense back then. Copyright was strictly a civil issue, like patent infringement is today. Criminal copyright penalties were introduced for film and sound recordings in 1982, and for everything else in 1992. Thirty years ago, it wasn't even clear that computer programs should be copyrightable at all. There was considerable discussion over this, and prominent authors argued against it. [digital-law-online.info]

Byte Magazine, in the early days, ran full page ads for a company called "Pirate's Harbor". "Locksmith", a tool for breaking copy protection, was a successsful commercial product.

Even if it's labelled a crime it's not necessarily wrong. RMS keeps arguing this point over and over again, for example here [gnu.org], and as the parent is writing it was certainly a matter of debate at the time whether software could be copyrighted at all.

Simply put morality and the law are two separate issues. Even justice and the law are separate issues. Need I bring Martin Luther King Junior in here?

Regardless of the chuckles and oh-so-funny jokes coming from the peanut gallery on this, software sold by Microsoft then and now (and by thousands of other commercial vendors) has a certain licensing agreement associated with it. Whether this is "right", "wrong", "good" or "evil", that's the way it is. The alternative is not to use the software - just as the alternative to dealing with the RIAA is not to listen to their music.

There's a lot to understand about the early days of personal computing. Consider Microsoft: it's biggest accomplishment was porting BASIC (for which they used publicly-available source code) to port to the ALTAIR (for which Mr. Allen wrote the interpreter). So, the BASIC which Mr. Gates so zealously defended was taken from BASIC source code which was publicly available.

His defense of copyright was hypocritical, at best. The one piece of code to which Microsoft had clear copyright (the ALTAIR emulator) was written on a college PDP machine, and wasn't contested. The bit that *was* contested was code *which Gates himself* had taken from public domain.

The historical context is simple. At the time, code was shared freely, to the profit of everyone involved. Everyone stood tall, until Gates and his ilk arrived, standing on the shoulders of giants and proclaiming they were the tallest motherfuckers around.

The whole idea of someone "owning" a chunk of computing is bunk. It always has been. It hurts us all. Do you think Microsoft would be where they are today without freely-available code? If so, take back Altair BASIC, take back the TCP stack in MS-Windows (taken from BSD TCP), take back MS Internet Explorer and MS HTTP. Take it all away, and see where Microsoft stands.

Historically, his rant was nothing but petty hypocritical gutter-sniping from an ultra-rich college punk.

Your historical context is valuable, but it doesn't justify your claim that the whole idea of owning the rights to software is bunk. Let me provide a little more historical context.

Historically, there was never any legal notion that works in the public domain couldn't or shouldn't be used as the basis for propiratary works. If I take a novel in the public domain, I am free to write a sequel to it, using the same characters and settings, but not release my sequal into the public domain. Indeed, many legal

There you have Bill Gates's basic view of the world: "I've done all this work and you owe me." Maybe he still thinks that way; I've never met him so I dunno. Well, he's been paid back a few times over for his investment. I am always struck by his line "The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000." Note that he doesn't say that it *cost* him $40,000, only that the value of the time exceeded that amount. What's up with that? Where'd he get that computer time and who paid for it?

"I've done all this work and you owe me." Maybe he still thinks that way

Do you feel that way after you do work? I know I do. Until that check clears, somebody definitely owes me for making computers do things for them that they themselves couldn't or didn't do. Like Bill, I'd be especially tweeked if someone else was cashing in on it (my work) instead.

I'm glad for you that you can do the work you want with your waking hours, and not worry about exchanging that time for the value (cash) with which you

In terms of "scientific tools", I don't remember seeing any serious Fortran compilers until the IBM PC became available and ditto for Pascal.

My recollection was that MS was selling Fortran for CP/M in 1979 and there were hooks to make use of the AMD 9511/9512 numeric processors. Some of the oddities of the L80 linker were due from the support for Fortran-80. Development on F80 stopped in 1982.

The UCSD P-system had both a Pascal and Fortran compiler - though run-time speed was slow. DR had Pascal MT+ - al

Of course, the exact same argument is being made today, by Microsoft and Adobe, but also by the RIAA and MPAA. It's funny how Gates earlier words on the subject seem to carry so much more force. At the time he had a small company with an honest mission, and it's hard not to feel a little bit bad about how everyone was using his software but hardly anybody was paying him for it.

Fortunately, what is true for small markets is not true for larger, established markets. Enough companies make money off of OSS to help support its development, and free music will hopefully become viable as the cost of production falls closer and closer to hobbyist levels. That being said, there is a fundamental truth to Gates' words: successful pioneers deserve to be paid.

That being said, there is a fundamental truth to Gates' words: successful pioneers deserve to be paid.

It's funny that he now thinks of pioneers as "loss leaders" and pledges not to enter a "market" until it's "mature". "Mature" means there's enough public awareness to buy one of the "loss leaders" for a song or crush the rest of them for nothing.

The biggest mistake, however, is to buy the core message. Free software, developed by users, blows non free software away. The "quality" software and docmentation he said could only be created by paying him is here and "flooding the market." The whole binary ecology is based on a lie. The biggest part of that lie is that there's no other way to make software and that we must sacrifice our freedom to have computers that work.

The tide is already turning. DRM'd music is making the cost of non free software obvious to everyone. The abundance of free software that anyone can download and use [mepis.org], blows everything Bill says right out of the water. Your children will not be able to believe that public school systems were once sued for sharing text editors.

"The Altair was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics for January 1975. It was the world's first mass-produced personal computer kit, as well as the first computer to use an Intel 8080 processor."

Below is a reply in the subsequent issue [digibarn.com] from the "hobbyists". Interesting to see what things was like back then -- same discussions, arguments etc. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Your software has helped many hobbyists, and you are to be thanked for
it! However, you should not blame the hobbyists for your own inadequete
marketing of it. You gave it away; none stole it from
you. Now you're asking for software welfare so you can give more
away. If $2/hr is all you got for your efforts, then $2/hr is what
they're worth on the free market. You should either change your
product or change your way of selling it, if you feel it'll bring more
money. I'm sure that if I were MITS, I'd be chuckling all the way to
the bank over the deal I got from you. After all, your marvelous
software has allowed them to sell a computer which, without it, none
would have touched, except as a frustrating novelty item.

I congratulate you and MITS upon being major influences in the
founding of the computer hobby market. It's too bad you didn't get the
profit from your efforts that they did from theirs, but that's
your fault, not theirs or the hobbyists. You underpriced your
product.

If you want monetary reward for your software creations, you had
better stop writing code for a minute and think a little harder about
your market and how are you going to sell to it. And, by the way,
calling all of your potential future customers thieves is
perhaps "uncool" marketing strategy!

Man, it feels good to blaze away on the keyboard once in a while. If only I can code this fast! Any errors are solely mine of course. Please check originals for identity of poster, additional context regarding this letter, and to verify any typos.

"What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"- Linus Torvalds and another couple hundred- Andrew Tridgell and another couple dozen- Larry Wall and another couple thousand- Marc Andreessen and who knows how many- Repeat for several thousand other projects...

"The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software"Until 1991.

Guess that's why he hates Linux so much, they blew his whole argument.

Linus Torvalds was a college student when he wrote Linux.Marc Andreesen was a college student when he wrote Netscape.Tridge was an administrative employee of Australian National University when he wrote Samba. He later went on to teach & lecture, but that was after he reverse engineered SMB.Of Larry Wall, I'm not entirely certain, however given his training is as a linguist, I doubt any employer in that field was interested in underwriting Perl.

Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.

To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.

GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.

Who Am I? I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.

Why I Must Write GNU I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.

So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.

How You Can Contribute I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.

One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.

Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.

If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.